Nurturing Wellness in Small Steps and Big Leaps

While my first few posts have focused on identifying different components of wellness, the ultimate goal will be to prescribe actionable ways to nurture, upgrade, or improve your wellness.

While most of us have a long way to go until we reach a point of sophisticated wellness in these various facets of health and wellness, often it is the small, everyday decisions that we make that can have the greatest impact because of the frequency with which we made them.  This Memorial Day weekend, I find myself practicing several facets of my wellness with in both big steps and small.

I live in Akron, OH, and my brother, with whom I'm very close, lives in Chicago.  We get to see each other every few months, but when I move to Texas in August that may not be possible.  I wanted to fit in an extra visit this summer, so yesterday my girlfriend Casey and I drove up to Chicago for the long weekend.  It's great to spent time with Philip and his girlfriend Emily, and I think this is a great example of a large-scale practice of social wellness.  Philip and I can interact by phone calling, texting, Facebooking, and emailing, and we do, but nothing substitutes spending time together in person.

Casey and I made what we thought would be a small step towards practicing our financial wellness, or living frugally, by driving a nontraditional route to Chicago by non-toll roads.  This was an adventure at best, and a disaster at worse.  While we should have guessed that our off-map route would have added two hours to our trip, it was an unwelcome surprise.  We wound up saving a little money, but likely will not take that route again.  I think it was the thought that counted, and I look forward to further small ways to spend a little less money.

Lastly, today we walked from Lincoln Park back to their place in Wicker Park instead of taking a cab.  We wound up walking about an extra 6 miles total today, which was not insignificant given our adult beverage consumption last night, but again I am happy with the result of finding small ways to practice both financial and environmental wellness.  Chicago is a great city, with many nice parks, and we had a great day.  

Good luck finding ways - both big and small - to practice different facets of your own wellness.  Happy Memorial Day weekend. 

Consolidated 6-part Wellness Framework

While my original intention was to slowly develop 8 components of wellness, introducing each with its own blog post, I realized that I didn't have 8 components of wellness to introduce.  I have noticed redundancies in others' frameworks that I've previously studied.  So over the past few days I have considered each area of wellness as I see it, how to group certain ones together, and how effectively I could describe and discuss different categories.  The result is a framework of 6 components:

1. Physical Wellness
2. Social Wellness
3. Emotional Wellness
4. Environmental Wellness
5. Intellectual Wellness
6. Financial Wellness

These components are consistent with the framework that I developed while in relevant committees at the university, but are consolidated based on the level of importance that I belief each area of wellness has.  I have combined emotional wellness and spiritual wellness, for example, as well as financial wellness and professional wellness.  This 6-part framework will make it easier for individuals to improve different aspects of their personal wellness without either over burdening them with unnecessary overlap. 

As discussed previously, physical wellness is comprised of exercise, nutrition, and sleep - all of which are equally important.  I have also begun to describe one aspect of social wellness, that there are many benefits that we get out of intimate, human-to-human interactions, which we do not get from texting and emails.  While I will discuss each of these activities further in future posts, the implied general recommendation for now is to exercise, eat well, get enough sleep, and try to interact with people on a human level (or "upgrade your interactions," as I like to say).

To build on this previously discussed notion of social wellness on a human-to-human level, however, there is a community component to it.  In order to maximize your well being, you should strive to be an active member of your community, however you define your own community.  Whether it is your neighborhood, school district, or city, the area that you are physically a part of is a dynamic entity that reflects the actions and involvement of its residents.  Participating in neighborhood meetings, voting on relevant issues, and having an active hand in improving your community can bring great joy and fullfillment.

There are many ways to become more active in your community.  You can help organize block parties, patronize yard sales, and petition local government on issues important to your area.  You can also start a public garden, run a canned-food or fundraising drive for local charities, or volunteer for after-school events to help children in your area.  You can read more about how community gardens improve quality of life, volunteering your time can benefit you, and charitable contributions can improve your overall wellness.

 It is not always easy to determine how you can best contribute to your community, improving the quality of life for yourself and for those around you.  It is certain, however, that some effort is better than no effort at all.  If you have one hour per week or one afternoon per month, you have the opportunity to be involved, contribute, and improve.  Your community will thank you for your interaction, and your personal social wellness will be upgraded. 

Social Wellness

As we become more and more dependent on technology, our social wellness becomes more compromised.  As described in the NYT article Antisocial Networking? by Hilary Stout, friends text each other instead of calling them, flirting is conducted on Facebook, and teenagers think that they're closer to each other than ever before.  But these "digital natives," or people who have grown up with these technologies, face severe disabilities when it comes to developing trusting relationships, handling face-to-face interaction, or thinking

on their feet. 

The University of California-Riverside, whose HR department has successfully articulated several dimensions of wellness, defines social wellness as "the ability to relate to and connect with other people in our world...to establish and maintain positive relationships with family, friends, and co-workers...."  This is a good start to identifying what it means to be socially well, but I think that it is necessary to identify different forms of connection, so that we may become aware of how often we interact with others in a healthy, pre-tech overload way, and often we rely on the crutch of impersonal, text-based messaging. 

When author Dennis Lehane gave the commencement address at my college graduation, he shared a longing for the times before iPod, texting, and Facebook, when he might meet a stranger in public, as they wait for a bus or walk through the park, and have a real conversation.  He anticipated a growing reliance on technology-based interaction that would corrode the value we can add and the benefits that we can get from human-to-human interactions.  He forewarned that these enablers of artificial interaction would devalue business, friendship, and even spousal relationships.  And just a few years after that commencement speech, it appears that he was right. 

In pursuit of social wellness, we cannot settle for content-only interaction.  After a text-messaging "conversation" with an old friend, do you feel warm and happy, as you would have if you met them in a coffee shop?  Do you email your boss to clarify a project, or do you walk down the hall to talk in person?  Which is more rewarding?  As a former staff manager, I can say that only the employees who participated in person, who started conversations with me, gave themselves the opportunity to stand out.  Those others who never left their desk or spoke out loud did not.  In pursuit of social wellness, we should maximize the percentage of our interactions that are more personable: 1) in person instead of through email; 2) phone call instead of text message; 3) hand-written letter instead of email, etc. 

Obviously there is a benefit to technology.  Without video chat, for example, you might go years without seeing your loved ones.  Without the time that email saves us, we might not be able to accomplish nearly as much as we intend to.  But for the interactions that we can "upgrade" in how intimate they are, we should seize the opportunity to do so.  As Dennis Lehane asked of us, we should take the iPod out of our ears when we're in a crowd of people; we should hand-write thank you letters and post cards; and we should reinstate the pop-in to reverse the destructive reactions that we can all have when someone rings our home doorbell (who is trying to sell me something now??).  Add social wellness to our growing framework of integrated wellness.  In addition to physical wellness (nutrition, exercise, sleep), be mindful of your interpersonal interactions, and strive to make them as human-to-human as possible.  They more you can upgrade your relationships, the more benefits you'll receive from them, and the more "well" you will be.

Integrated Wellness Framework

As I alluded to in my previous post, there are multiple facets of wellness that, when developed individually and as a whole, make up what I refer to as an integrated wellness framework.  One focus of this blog is the unique balance that everyone should strike, so as to optimize their own wellness and to avoid over-focusing on any one particular component of wellness; anything taken to the extreme can become detrimental, no matter how beneficial and healthy the activity may be in moderation. 

Consider young Olympian gymnasts: they are in impeccable physical condition, but are socially well?  intellectually well?  emotionally well?  If they focused solely on athletic perfection, without consideration of developing friendships, working hard in school, or failed to truly enjoy their lives, then likely not.  Read more about the risks of social isolation in early sports specialization here. 

Likewise, consider the wunderkind who becomes CEO at 40.  Remarkable professional wellness (or occupational wellness, as some call it); they have mastered certain aspects of their industry and likely have had a tremendous education.  But their physical well being?  environmental, emotional, and spiritual well beings?  Those likely are not in such good condition.  To read more about work-life balance, read selections from Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America here.

Perfection should not be our goal.  Nor should we strive to develop each component of wellness equally.  Rather, we should (1) learn about the importance of each component, (2) decide how far we would like to personally develop them, (3) actively progress to a minimum baseline in each component of wellness, and then further depending on our goals, and finally (4) aim to bring it all together into a well-rounded, happy, healthy, and positive life. 

In the previous post, I made a note on the most commonly focused on component of wellness, physical wellness, and how it is comprised of nutrition, exercise, and sleep.  I will use a framework similar to this one to identify and deconstruct the different aspects of each wellness component (of which, as you can see, there are 8).  Once I have introduced each component of wellness, we can back track and systematically delve deeper into each.

Please feel free to share comments, questions, and bits of supporting (or contradicting) evidence.  Be well. 

All-Day Wellness

In All-Day Wellness, I'll be exploring various forms of wellness and how individuals can improve these different areas of life.  I will modify existing wellness frameworks, integrate them, add my own insight, ask for participation, and seek to construct a thorough, informative, and supportive environment for people to learn about how to better themselves.

My name is Brian Anderson, and I am a finance professional.  I am currently finishing my MBA degree in Akron, OH, and this fall I'll be moving to San Antonio, TX, to start my PhD in finance.  I am very interested in personal wellness, and have had the unique opportunity to study different facets of wellness as a member of an exploratory committee of administrators, educators, and fellow students at the University of Akron.  In this blog I will try to articulate the different kinds of wellness that create an integrated, overall wellness, and explore ways to practice and improve each type.  The goal is an everlasting, integrated, All-Day Wellness. 

While I look forward to laying out the different facets of wellness that everyone should be aware of, in this brief introductory post I'd like to clarify something about the most visible, most discussed, and most misunderstood type of wellness there is: physical wellness.

Physical wellness is comprised of three different activites: eating, exercising, and sleeping.  Despite many common misconceptions, one is unable to be truly "well" without competence in each of these three categories.  In other words, you may not neglect one activity because you excel in another.  You cannot eat junk food if you sleep 9 hours every night; you cannot forgo exercising if you eat a clean and balanced diet; and you cannot train like a marathoner or NBA star if you only sleep 3 hours a night.  It is impossible to ignore one of these basic building blocks of wellness and hope to optimize your energy, health, and happiness.

In this blog I will challenge many preconceived notions of what "healthy" really means.  Where applicable (and when I remember to) I will include links for citations and expert opinions on controversial topics.  It is crucial to remember, however, that while there is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimal wellness for everyone, there are basic principles, expert theories, and evidence-based research that suggests that certain lifestyles and daily routines are more beneficial than others, and in this blog I will strive to bring a general education to most on the dynamics and benefits of personal wellness.  I invite all to participate, either by striking up a conversation, engaging me directly, or simply by reading and considering the content for yourself.  I look forward to exploring these topics, and hope that you receive some benefit from this blog.  Be well.